


Whether You Ask It or Not

by shadesfalcon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Ficlet, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, One Shot, Sick Character, no seriously I'm not kidding I acutally wrote fluff guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-06
Updated: 2014-11-06
Packaged: 2018-02-24 09:50:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2577152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadesfalcon/pseuds/shadesfalcon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written in response to a prompt I got on my <a href="http://polyamoryavengers.tumblr.com/">tumblr</a>. Prompt was "Can you write a Clintasha one where one or the other is hurt and needs to be taken care of?"<br/>I meant Clint to be a little more attentive, but it's always a fight to get Natasha to let people do things for her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whether You Ask It or Not

“You look like shit,” Clint laughed. “Aren’t you supposed to be down debriefing?”

Natasha blinked at him slowly, and Clint glanced her over again, this time more carefully. “Uh, no seriously. You look like shit? What happened?”

“I think I _am_ supposed to be in the briefing room right now.”

“Yeah.” Something was definitely on her mind. She hadn’t made one comeback about his “look like shit” comments.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” Which was supposed to be a joke. Except that she didn’t really look right at his hand when he raised it. She kind of looked to the side of it, like he was out of focus.

He took an involuntary step toward her when she didn’t answer.

“Natasha? I need you to”- He didn’t have time to finished the sentence, because her eyes went back in her head and her knees buckled.

He moved to catch her before she could collapse completely. Part of his mind was still mostly sure that this was some elaborate joke. He’d seen the Black Widow take three bullets, one of them fracturing her ankle. Her response to three extra holes in her body was to stand on one foot firing casually back behind a corner, while continuing her interrogation. It took a lot to put her on the ground.

Which was the reason that the other part of his mind was panicking.

“Hey!” he screamed through the hallway. “I need some help here!” He laid her carefully on the cold tile and bent over her. “Natasha! Agent Romonoff! I need you to respond. Give me something!”

He was running his hands and eyes over her body, though he didn’t really expect to find anything. She was stubborn, but not stupid. If she’d gotten shot on that last mission (hadn’t it been something stupidly mundane in Sri Lanka?), she’d at least have reported to medical for some antibiotics.

It was when this thought occurred to him, that she started seizing. Whole body rigidity, and foaming mouth, and all. He slid himself around to her head, holding it straight and steady. He was vaguely aware that someone near him was on the intercom with a medical team.

He pushed his hands tighter against her temples, leaning over her face. He touched their foreheads together, twitching with her as her body tried to throw her head around.

“Please, stop,” he whispered, to her or God or himself. “Stop. Just stop. Please, stop.”

***

She didn’t stop until the physician administered an IV medication. He started with Lorazepam, frowning slightly when it had no effect, and then added Fosphenytoin. Finally, her shaking slowed and stilled.

“The seizure itself isn’t so concerning,” the physician said, and Clint assumed he was the intended audience, since Natasha still didn’t appear responsive. “A body can seize for a variety of reasons, and there are no long term side-effects. She might be postictal, but the symptoms will subside.”

“But?” Clint asked, because there was clearly one coming.

“Well, like I said. The body can seize for a variety of reasons. Many of which don’t make much sense in her case. No signs of trauma, no history of epilepsy or congenital defects. No heart problems, no history of drug abuse. Or,” he glanced down at the thick chart that Clint knew held more details about her time in the Red Room than he ever wanted to know. “No drugs that make sense this far out from their last use.”

“So what’s left?”

“Infections. Toxins. Snake bite.” He shrugged. “Pregnancy.”

Clint snorted.

“Yeah, we checked anyway, but it’s not that.”

“What do you mean by toxins?”

“There’s a variety. Lead poisoning being one. We’re running blood panels now. Honestly, I’m hoping we get a hit. Most toxins we can treat. If it’s something like a brain infection or a kidney failure?” He sighed.

Which was when she started seizing again.

***

“Strychnine?” Clint echoed. “Doesn’t that usually kill people? More quickly than this?”

“Yes,” the new physician agreed. There was a whole team working on her now, and Clint couldn’t keep track of them all. He should probably, but too much of his mind was busy telling himself to stay calm.

“So why is it strychnine?”

“Her lab work clearly shows dangerous levels, and the symptoms match. Besides the timeline. It’s possible that it’s an altered form, targeted directly at her.” He looked Clint up and down. “How are you feeling? You were the first person to have physical contact with her after her arrival. Any muscle rigidity? Feelings of anxiety?”

Clint stared at the man, until he wisely chose to change the subject.

“Yeah, anyway. We’re flooding her with fluids, but, other than that, she’s on her own. Also, we’ll just have to hope we got the oxygen on her in time.”

“In time for what?”

“In time to prevent brain damage.”

***

He was sitting by her bedside when she woke up, which was a statistical probability, given how much time he’d spent there. Her hand twitched, her first voluntary movement in some time, and his attention refocused on her.

She seemed to panic, at first. Eyes going everywhere. She thrashed in the bed, pulling her rolling IV closer to the bed with the force of her reaction.

Clint stood and took the oxygen mask off her face. If he took deep gratification in how much she calmed the moment she saw him, he didn’t say.

“What was it?” she asked. First words, predictably goal-oriented.

“Poison. Probably released in aerosol form on your flight back. The pilot who took you died an hour ago. Guess they didn’t properly account for your body’s tenacity.”

“I guess Department X did something good for me, after all.”

Clint hummed non-commitantly.

“What’s the poison?”

“Strychnine.”

“Good!”

“Pardon?”

“It’s not something I have to stay in here for.”

She was twisting at the tubes in her arms, kicking at the tight white sheets around her legs, and Clint rushed to stand up. Not that he was sure, exactly, what he was going to try and do. If she had decided she was getting out of the bed, then he wasn’t going to be able to stop her.

Clint did manage to convince her to leave one IV in, but only because he said he’d carry it. He trailed behind her, holding the bag of fluid above his head as she made her way down the hallway. He managed to use his free hand to send Coulson a text, since he didn’t think their unexplained disappearance would be appreciated.

He also doubted that their explained disappearance was going to be appreciated, but he wasn’t going to be the one to drag her back there. Even if she were the kind of person to lie still, she wouldn’t do it there. Not in a white room that smelled like antiseptic and plastic wrapped equipment.

They were all the way out to the parking lot when she spoke.

“Clint.”

“What?”

“I’m going to fall down.”

“What?”

“You fucking heard me.”

He shifted the IV bag quickly, and got his other hand around her waist. She managed to wrap her arm up and around his shoulder at the same time that her knees gave out. She hung there, and Clint looked around for his car.

“Just take me me to my house, ok? The official one.”

“Not a chance in hell. You’re coming to my apartment, and if you think otherwise, you better at least get the energy to stand on your own two feet before you offer to fight me.”

***

It was less of a struggle to get her onto the couch than he thought it would be. Which was a worry in and of itself, but he pushed it away.

“Need anything?”

“Hand me your computer.”

“If you drink a bottle of water.” Her IV had long since run empty.

“I already have to pee every 10 seconds.”

“Water bottle or no computer.”

She eyed the laptop across the room, measuring out how many steps in her mind, but Clint rushed over to it.

“If you think,” he warned her, “that I’m above running around the room, clutching this to my chest until you get tired, then you and I don’t know each other very well at all yet.”

She leaned back against the couch back. “Fine.”

So it continued through the day. Natasha would demand something, and Clint would demand something back. He tried not to think too hard about what she was doing on his computer, and whether or not he’d get an angry email from SHIELD about “security protocol” from whatever sites she was on.

Eventually he settled in next to her. She had some saltine crackers in her left hand, a bite taken out of one of them, but hadn’t moved in some time. Clint let his eyes trace over her lips where cracker crumbs and salt shone at him.

“Take a picture,” she murmured, still not looking at him. He didn’t say anything, leaning his head down on her shoulder instead. There was the briefest moment of hesitation, and then she also leaned her head to the side, to rest on his own.

The close contact meant he could feel it when a shudder ran through her. He jumped up and reach over to pull at the blanket he had draped over the back of the couch. She didn’t resist when he tucked it around her shoulders.

“Look at me,” he grinned. “I’m slowly training the wild horse. See how she has already grown accustomed to my presence and ministrations.”

“Fuck you. And I’m a wild dragon before I’m a wild horse.” Her mouth turned down slightly.

“What’s wrong.”

“I’ve been staring at this screen for 20 minutes, and I still can’t remember what I was doing.” She rubbed her face with her cracker-less hand. “I can’t think straight.”

“Confusion is a symptom of both strychnine poisoning and seizures.”

“I _can’t_ be confused. I can’t afford it. I can’t ever afford it. They taught me better than this. They _made_ me better than this.”

“Whoa. Hold on.” He shut the laptop and leaned to shove it underneath the couch. “That’s so not relevant. You have a poison in your body, that was _specifically designed_ for you. You were the target, and it still didn’t work. They recreated a toxin just to kill you, and it didn’t work. So you have some confusion. It’s not death. Accept that strong doesn’t mean the same thing as invincible.”

She groaned and twisted around to lie with her face in the cushion. He had to listen carefully to understand her words, enunciated around of mouthful of pillow. “What if this happened in the field? Look at me right now!”

“Oh please. Like you wouldn’t figure something out if you had to.” He slapped her butt, hard enough that he could see the red peeking out from underneath her shorts. “Now come on. Sit up. I’ll make chicken soup or something.”

She thrashed around some, waving her arms, but made no move to sit up. Clint tried to stifle the laugh, but ended up making a choking noise. He couldn’t help it. He’d never seen her throw a hissy fit. Usually that was Stark’s department. Or his, if he was being honest.

She sat up suddenly, scrambling with weak fingers at her clothes. “It’s too hot.”

“You were shivering.”

“And now it’s too hot. Get these off.”

He sighed heavily, pulling her shirt off over her head. He thought he’d be able to leave the shorts alone, since they didn’t cover much, but she wasn’t having it. After a brief fight among Clint, Natasha, the blanket, and the law of gravity, he managed to slide them off and toss them across the room.

He stood up then, and made his way to the front hall closet, where he pulled out a length of white fluffy polar fleece. It was huge, and he bundled it up in his arms.

“There’s enough fabric there to stop a bullet. Where did you get that?”

“Found it in a hole-in-the-wall in Turkey. The shop was going out of business and they had this fabric. It felt like a fucking cloud or something, I don’t know. I bought all they had left of it. It’s five or six yards, or something like that. Not even a blanket really. Just an length of fabric.”

He dropped it down onto her, covering her entire body, and then used it to wrap around her and pick her up, leaving the scratchier wool blanket behind on the couch.

“Where are you taking me?” She kicked a little bit, but apparently decided the motion made her look to undignified to be worth the wasted energy.

“It’s bedtime.”

“Mmmng.” It was a protest, but not an intense one.

He dropped her unceremoniously onto his bed when he got there, and her toes flexed when she bounced, like a cat trying to get its orientation back to normal.

“’Night, little dragon. May your fires ever burn hot upon your unsuspecting foes.”

“You better believe it,” she mumbled, already half-asleep.


End file.
